So I am reading Stephen Greenblatt’s new “biography” of Shakespeare and I am not sure it is really working for me as a biography. I keep wanting to put it down when I think of it that way. Why? Well, biographies tend to be very fact-driven. That is sort of a defining characteristic of the genre. As Greenblatt admits, a lot of the details of Shakespeare’s life are sketchy and that’s why biographers have had trouble tackling him.
Greenblatt is a New Historicist, though, and the book might work fine for me if I think of it as a representative of that genre: re-create the world around the writer and figure out how the latter (and his/her creative output) was shaped by the former. Since I double-majored in literature and history in college, New Historicism naturally appealed to me quite a bit. I walked a thin interdisciplinary line, however. One history prof. noted this in a critique of a paper I wrote late in my undergrad days: “This sounds like it was written by a literature major” (i.e. it was factually too “soft” to be Real History, properly done, and the language was more like literary criticism than history). A second draft of the paper cleared this problem up.
Later on, I had some of that interdisciplinary blending trained out of me by some very kick-ass historians, which might be part of the reason I have trouble reading literary criticism now (and particularly New Historicism). When Greenblatt writes something that he doesn’t know to be fact– “Shakespeare might have done X”– I cringe and start grinding my teeth. Because, well, he might NOT.
HOWEVER, in writing a New Historicist “biography”, Greenblatt does something that historians do not have the balls to do (or, more truthfully, have been trained NOT to do)– he SUPPOSES. This offers quite a bit for the imagination, as long as you don’t necessarily *believe* it, and adds something to the story that you could not take away from a conventional biography. He can talk a lot about Stratford and England at the time– people who passed through, things that happened– things that a historian would KNOW, but would discount as irrelevant if no line could be directly drawn between these things and the subject of the biography.
So maybe I should continue reading.